


here and where you are

by windupclock



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Compliant, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, i made too many evil eye jokes in the process of writing this, not necessarily an au per se but.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-04
Updated: 2020-02-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:40:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22564144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windupclock/pseuds/windupclock
Summary: Jon isn't sure when the mark shows up.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 12
Kudos: 473





	here and where you are

**Author's Note:**

> title is from corpse song by mary oliver: "i exist in two places / here and where you are. / pray for me / not as i am but as i am."
> 
> i will make jon jewish and there is nothing anyone can do to stop me. thank you for your time.

Jon isn’t sure when the mark shows up.

It’s not that he’s unobservant—although he  _ has  _ been accused of missing the forest for a single tree—but that he doesn’t spend a lot of time scrutinizing his forearms. He’s been wearing long-sleeved shirts for a while; looking too closely at the scars crawling across his pitted flesh doesn’t do his stomach any favors.

But the mark isn’t a scar. Jon has plenty of scars, and this is not one.

He notices it between blinks one day—his eyes readjust and it’s there, looking for all the world like that’s where it belongs. It stands out against the pockmarked white and pink of the scars and the brown of his skin, etched in clear black and blue like a tattoo. Jon has plenty of scars, but he does not have any tattoos. There is no texture to it against his skin; with his eyes closed, he can’t feel a difference between it and the unblemished patch around it.

With his eyes open, there’s no way he could miss it.

The symbol is familiar: concentric circles of dark blue, white, light blue, and black, layered into the shape of an eye. After everything he’s learned recently, being marked by an eye should be less than a comfort, but this is not an eye that Watches. This is an eye that protects.

His grandmother had a nazar hanging by the door growing up, and the evil eye charm stared out of several pieces of her jewelry. Jon has them all now: the nazar by the door of his office; the earrings and bracelets gathering dust in some old box; and now, apparently, one of his own clinging to his arm.

Somewhere in the pit of his stomach—a place he shoves deep down inside himself when it gives a voice to his unease and terror, the writhing of worms—he knows he should be alarmed.

But he cannot muster any fear.

He will count any protection against the evil eye as a gift, and he will not look it in the mouth.

* * *

“Do you know anything about suddenly appearing tattoos?”

Sasha blinks up at him. “What?”

Jon pulls his sleeve up to show her. Sasha stares at it for a long moment. She does not touch his arm. A few months ago, before the attack, she would have touched his arm. He thinks she would have touched his arm. The thought constricts his chest for a moment, and his next breath comes rough.

“It just… was there,” he manages. “Earlier today. Or maybe—it might have been there earlier and I didn’t notice. I’m not sure.”

“Hm,” she says. “Well, did you go out last night?”

It has the suggestion of a joke in it, but only an echo, only because he knows the words should be a joke. Her delivery is sharp and dry. He looks her over for a mark of her own, but it’s hard to keep his eyes on her for long enough to check. His eyes slip away when he gets too close to an answer.

“I didn’t go out last night.”

She lifts her shoulders in a listless shrug. “I’ll do some research,” she says, and then turns back around.

Jon remembers they used to be better than this. He  _ knows  _ they were better than this, but there is nothing there when he presses for specifics.

* * *

There is a mark on Tim’s wrist when Jon comes into work the next day. He only catches a glimpse of it: curls of red and orange, twisting towards the back of his hand, careful to avoid the holes.

During lunch, he gets a good look at it and realizes it’s a torch. Not the modern kind, sleek and metal, but old-fashioned wood and flame. It’s a nice design, the colors crisp and the curves of fire elegant. “New tattoo?” he asks. It’s a nice tattoo. The sort someone could feasibly get inked onto them of their own volition. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with Jon’s.

Tim gives him a look midway between confusion and derision. It somehow works on him. “Pardon?”

Jon points to the mark, which Tim stares at for a long second, confusion winning out as his face loses its sharpness. “What in the  _ fuck _ ,” he says flatly. “I hate working here.”

“I assume that means you didn’t get it yourself?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“I noticed this yesterday,” Jon says, pulling up his own sleeve to show the mark off. It feels oddly, painfully vulnerable, Tim’s squinting gaze on his skin excruciating.

“What is it?”

“A nazar. The evil eye.” Tim’s head jerks up at that, and Jon can’t hold back a chuckle. “Not like that. The evil eye’s an old superstition, jealousy and flattery and all that. The charm’s supposed to protect you from it.”

“Well,” Tim mutters. “We all could use some of that.”

Jon nods and looks down at the mark. Wonders what it means. Wonders if it’s a sign—and if it is, is it a blessing or a curse?

* * *

The mark begins to tingle. That’s the only word he can think of for the feeling: frisson creeping under his skin, the hairs standing on end. Like the slow crawl of insect legs, but a hundred times more pleasant, because, well, there aren’t  _ actually  _ insects crawling over him. He finds himself smiling when it happens, absently pressing his fingers to the mark through his sleeve. Remembering that not everything beyond the natural is horrific.

The feeling only comes when he’s at work.

(He refuses to connect the dots, but the feeling only comes when he’s around Martin.)

* * *

The mark has been there for months when Jon comes to a realization.

It’s not a capital-R Realization, nothing to do with the Eye; he doesn’t think the eldritch power Elias has sold him to puts a lot of stock into his romantic feelings. It’s the quieter, more mundane type of discovery, but that doesn’t make it any less unsettling.

The moment he realizes isn’t anything grand or complicated: Martin doesn’t show up to work one day, and Jon misses him.

* * *

He tries to ignore it.

He really does. He stays in his office and throws himself into his work and tries not to look directly at Martin’s face, but a magnet can’t help being drawn to its opposite pole. The Archives aren’t that big, and with a staff of barely three, he can’t avoid Martin forever, and he doesn’t want to, not really.

Besides, when he  _ does  _ manage it for a while, seeing him again is accompanied by a new wave of  _ oh dear Lord _ , somehow stronger than the one before it, and a shiver underneath the mark and down Jon’s spine. Overall, it’s not what anyone would call sustainable.

So Jon doesn’t avoid him. He tries to act as normal as possible, and tries harder to remember what ‘normal’ used to mean before this whole mess, and if it ever actually meant anything at all. He sits in his office and pines, and he works very hard to pretend that he doesn’t look up hopefully whenever he hears footsteps in the hall outside.

* * *

Martin is hunched over Melanie’s desk when Jon comes in, the two of them whispering in tones that can only be called furtive. They startle and pull away at Jon’s footsteps.

“Morning,” he says, eyeing both of them suspiciously. 

Martin flushes—a sight that shouldn’t make butterflies take off in Jon’s stomach, given how often it happens, but the world is very rarely kind—and nods back at him. The left sleeve of his sweater is pushed up, and right above his wrist Jon catches a glimpse of blue, before Martin notices his gaze and tugs it quickly back down.

The color seems familiar somehow.

* * *

He sees the marks more and more: one on the side of Georgie’s neck, another on Melanie’s knee below the specter of her bullet wound. He’s not sure what it means that they match.

He gets an inkling when he sees that Daisy’s and Basira’s do too.

They’re not the only ones; he sees them on strangers, more and more as the weeks wear on. A sun on the ankle of a woman on the train, a knife on the elbow of a man in Artefact Storage, a pair of glasses on the back of someone’s neck as they duck their head. No one else seems bothered by them. He’s not sure if they can see them, or if it takes a trained Eye, but there’s something inexplicably comforting when he sees two people holding hands, their matching marks brushing against each other.

Again and again, he thinks about that flash of dark blue on Martin’s wrist, and he wonders.

* * *

When he is lost in the Lonely, adrift in the boundless nothingness and heavy with the knowledge that there is nothing on the horizon to save him, he touches the mark in a familiar gesture he cannot quite name prayer. To his surprise, his fingers meet warmth, beyond the normal heat of his skin. 

The mark is glowing. Faint, but clearly there: a pale silvery tint cast bright against his skin. He sucks in a sharp breath.

He does not question it. He does not have to ask. He cannot tell if it is knowing or Knowing, but he feels it as certain as the quickening pound of his heart.

The glow dims when he takes a step in the direction he tentatively names forward. It recovers its brightness when he steps back. Something in his gut, a tug against the side, tells him to go right. He does not question it. He follows.

With the mark as a compass, he makes his way through the Lonely.

The glow leads him to Martin, a shadow of himself awash in the emptiness. Jon is overwhelmed with desire—he wants to call his name and yell at him and touch him to make sure he’s real all at once—and for a second he stands there, his hands shaking slightly at his sides. Then Martin looks at him, and though recognition dawns faint in his eyes, his face does not change.

Jon hears the desperation in his voice. He tells Martin he needs him and there is nothing left in him that can muster up shame for it.

He pushes the sleeve of Martin’s sweater up, exposing his wrist and the mark there—an eye of circles, identical to Jon’s own, its glow cutting through the void. “Look at me,” he says, and touches Martin’s wrist against his forearm, bringing the marks together. “Look at me and tell me what you see.”

“I…” Martin stares at the marks, then at Jon, his eyes shifting like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. “I see _you_ , Jon,” he says, and the grip of the echo loosens on his voice.

This is the answer, then, incredibly obvious in retrospect: to leave the Isolation, you have to know you are not alone.


End file.
